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Not a lot of time on Tuesdays between school and picking up Sanguinity after work, so just a couple of links:

After I read Rahul Kanakia’s hilarious and unswerving YA novel Enter TItle Here, I started reading his blog. I’ve read this post three times: Some Advice to Writers on How to Search for the Heart of Longing. I like the connection he makes between a mundane-ish life and what makes you feel yearning and engagement as a reader. I also like its thinking-out-loud feel.

Lynda Barry has been linking to videos of the PS 22 Chorus on her class Tumblr. This morning’s was Coldplay’s Viva la Vida. I love how freely the kids sing and move. I would like to sing like that more.

Thanks to my union, I now have funding available for professional development! I combined it with the staff tuition benefit so I could take ASL 101 this term for no cash.

It’s been a few years since I was a student– my last class was calculus in 2014. It wasn’t until I was eating lunch before the first class session that I remembered there was probably a required textbook. Fortunately, college bookstores aren’t as mobbed during the first week as they used to be in the days before Amazon, and both staffing and books were plentiful.

Then when I got to class, the first thing the professor mentioned was D2L, the online system where the syllabus, assignments, and announcements live. Other people whipped out the syllabi they’d downloaded and printed, and I was like, oh yeah…D2L is a thing.

But in actual ASL skills, I have a bit of a head start– from finger-spelling as a kid, and from signing a little with Sanguinity when she was learning, and from combining signs and Chinuk wawa with the Where Are Your Keys method. So I understood the instructions to go to the online video ASL dictionary and learn five words a day that start with A in English, keep a list, and we’d teach each other in pairs during the next class. My partner did not catch the drift of this at all, and there was much confusion when we paired off Thursday and I was merrily signing and spelling, “Aquarium! Astronaut! Athlete!”

Since it is literally a 101 class, I’m not sure everyone gets that there’s a large component of teaching yourself between classes? (The book comes with DVDs for drills and mini-quizzes.) I suppose everything will be cleared up by and by. I’m not even sure I was supposed to stay on A words this whole week. But today I learned

I’m in a “500 Words a Day” group on FaceBook that’s pursuing what it says in the name, every day in October. Since I have a streak going on 750 Words already, I’m going for a blog post every day in October in addition. (Minus a few travel days later in the month, probably). They’ll be a lot fewer than 500 words a day, but I love everyday journal-blogs and miss the days when I had one.

Today I picked up my dress for a friend’s wedding. Sanguinity and I are both in the wedding party and needed a particular brand for purposes of matching color and fabric, so we went here, in Vancouver, Washington:

In addition to its Pinkwater-worthy name, Beyond the Veil has a full size range of sample dresses! unlike the three Portland shops I called first. C’mon, people, fat bridesmaids are a legit customer base! Anyway, they rock and I am almost sorry that my trips to Beyond the Veil (three in all) are concluded.

Other things today:

petted a labradoodle puppy named Teddy, so young he can’t go on walks in public yet, who loved chewing Sanguinity’s braid

made a grocery run and ended up with an inordinate amount of food to tote to my office: gum, peanut butter, English muffins, chocolate

finished Bil Wright’s Sunday You Learn How to Box, which I think is the earliest YA novel about a black gay boy that I’ve found, even though the pub date is a late-feeling 2000. But the book is set in the late 1960s and has a feel of that era in its sparseness and dialogue– it reminded me a bit of It’s Like This, Cat. So many pay phones!

Just today I started listening to Iris Dement. I was raised on country music and can’t believe I missed her entirely til now. This one made me tear up– I feel like I know several people just now who are feeling diminished, but who mean so much to the people who love them.

An interview with Atul Gawande by economist Tyler Cowen that’s not in the New Yorker, so maybe you missed it? Has sound (which I haven’t tested) and transcript. I liked this bit:

COWEN: Do you feel you’ve underachieved in life?

GAWANDE: That’s a hard question. [laughs] I know objectively that it’s kind of ridiculous that I would think I’ve underachieved, and that I’m proud of all the random things that I’ve been able to be part of. But I bear a kind of chronic dissatisfaction and sense that I’ve got much more to follow through on than I’ve managed to. So yeah, I think “underachieved” is the wrong word, and yet I don’t feel I’ve achieved nearly enough, and that half of what I’ve achieved, I wish I could go back and fix.

My morning walk took me past this little wooden shed on campus. It wasn’t open for business, but the sign says it’s called “art is a piece of cake” and is an art thesis project by Daphne Lyda. Fill me in if you know what’s inside!

Yesterday morning I just happened to see on Facebook that the public library was sponsoring An Evening with A.S. King that same night! And at Taborspace, a really nice comfy space attached to a church, in my part of town. Eeeeeee! Her breakout book was Please Ignore Vera Dietz, which hit my Lifetime Best list as soon as I read it a few years ago. I don’t love all her books equally, but each one is different from the others and I admire that. And her kind of weird often does it for me. So. I caught the late bus home from work by the skin of my teeth, had a few minutes to dine on crackers and chocolate milk, and drove over there.

There were May baskets hung on all the doors, and still plenty of seating. In fact, when someone who wasn’t there for the reading cleared out, I slid into a comfy armchair about ten feet from the lectern! Sara Ryan, the YA author who also runs YA for the library, did introductions. Laini Taylor was there too. And a mix of teenagers– mostly girls but some boys too– and gray-haired ladies with glasses like me.

A.S. King goes by Amy in person– she published under A.S. King from the start because there was already at least one Amy King publishing, and she chose that form because it spells Asking. In her opening patter she said she likes Portland because everything is made of wood. “I mean, of course other places have lots of wooden things too. But in Portland the signs are wooden, the steps are wooden!”

It turns out the first draft of Please Ignore Vera Dietz was written in 36 days. She is a total pantser, and is a little worried right now because her current novel is over 400 pages and not resolved. Someone asked how many drafts she goes through in revision, and she estimated a hundred to a hundred and fifty. She compared it to combing long hair–there’s no way you can yank through it all at once. You have to start at the bottom and work your way up little by little.

She reminded me a little of Lynda Barry. Maybe a little more extroverted– it felt like she could sit and shoot the breeze for hours (and I would be totally up for it). And she read a bunch from Still Life wIth Tornado, which is on my TBR stack and I’m pretty excited now to read it. So glad I made it to this event!